Aren't arguments about Linux being broken on the desktop red herrings? (linux, tux, herrings, red herrings?... ba boom tsh, I'll be here all week) The argument should be whether Linux, in my case Ubuntu, allows a Luser to work on h/is/er desktop. Positing one hypothetical, or specific case, after another and then proclaiming Linux is broken on the desktop is silly, as you pointed out. Linux now, compared to the early edition of Mandrake I first installed, is a working desktop OS.
Any OS intended for the desktop is trying to perform as a calibrated solution to an arbitrarily established target while trying to incorporate new features reflecting the advances of hardware manufactures. Moore's Law can be made to suggest the moving target any desktop OS has to aim at while not wasting limited resources developing features that the market might relegate to the margins. Linux has done, and continues to do, a great job of staying on target but will never meet the demands of all users, including those who want a, more or less, marginal feature made mainstream. Stating the bleeding obvious the strength of Linux and Open Source is anyone who wants a feature develop that feature given it's feasibility and a willingness to spend the necessary resources.
All large corporations, especially widely held corporations, are bound and driven by the profit motive. Limited resources and profit expectations don't always allow the best of all possible worlds.
'Bicycling Science', Ergonomics and Mechanics, by Whit and Wilson, mit press, is now in it's 3rd (?) edition. It's a must read, should have, if you're at all serious about cycling and it bleeds geekiness. I build my own bikes from stripped down frames up and do almost all my own maintenance. I've played with ideas for new bike designs for a few years and now am onto a new brain storm, likely to end with me struck by lightening and toasted, but I can't get enough of it.
Both genders are equally susceptible to the effects of hormones overriding their more rational thought processes. Our limbic system, (limbic I've recently been told is now a deprecated term to describe to describe our motivational systems) flush our more rational processes. What has become more apparent is that our wet core is necessary to our rational decision making no matter how we might like it to be otherwise. Women are just as hormonally driven as men and the study, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuates gender stereotyping and myth making that suggests the horned, male ego is pushing the agenda. It's a mark of cultivation and high intelligence that our libido can't cloud our objectivity. The female psyche may not be the eternal mystery to men that our mythology suggests although there are deep distinctive traits. I've been married and, if you count co-habitations as periods of 6 months or longer, then I've lived with 7 women. Although women, as a (stereo) type, might not count 6 months as a long term cohabitation and might just see it as typical of the male willingness to say anything and do anything just to get laid 2 or 3 times a day. In my experience, if emotions engendered by attractive, potential sex partners can inhibit our higher reasoning faculty, then emotions and drugs are devastating. Personally I've found the drunker I get the more attractive women find me. This effect is more pronounced if I'm alone on a bar stool and two or more attractive women are near by. Inevitably, as I nurse one drink after another, and glance their way, sooner or later, one or more return my interested looks and an uncontrolled giggle will escape. That's when I know they're attracted to me. Of course that kind of attention from beautiful women is unsettling and I usually down a few more quick drinks just to put things in perspective. It's then they can't seem to stop staring at me, and, just about then, the giggling stops and things get serious. I'm pretty sure their upset looks reflect a conflict among them as to which one will leave with me. Although I've never been able to verify my guess because about then one or all of them will ask the bartender to see me out. I take this as a consensus on their part that if one of them can't have me then, in the name of friendship, they'll jointly and severally forego my company. I usually leave peacefully not wanting to destroy any close friendships.
>Section 13 defines it as "discriminatory" for an individual or group "to communicate telephonically
>or to cause to be so communicated... any matter that is likely to expose a person or persons
>to hatred or contempt" based on characteristics such as race, religion, sexual orientation, and so on
The issues are very complex. My family goes well back into Canada's roots on both sides and, as a family we reside pretty much country wide.
Canada's heart lies in the idea of a cultural mosaic, maybe that came from our bilingual heritage and the more orderly development of our frontiers. Maybe it came from it being just to fucking cold to bother to with hate, and, hockey got rid of the aggressive edge. I think it was J. Cartier who said, "This must be the land God gave to Cain." What is certain is that Canada as a country bound to the idea of a cultural mosaic has always been deeply attentive to the rights of minorities and not without reason. Mackenzie King, one of Canada's longest reigning PMs, who held seances with the spirits of his dead mother and his dead dog fought against immigration into Canada by the mountainous Shik people of northern India because our climate would be too inhospitably cold for them (not as cold as the Prime Minister's shoulder).
I think what's new to the mix is a shift in demographics, a shift in political tactics and maybe the first hint of a Brave New World. The European stock that initially invaded North America has been recently outnumbered and, last year, Asian immigrants were the most prevalent. The shift in demographic to a truly multi racial, multi cultural mix probably has heightened the likelihood and exposure of racial hate. The law was to some extent enacted to combat racism doing more than rearing it's hydra heads. Political Correctness, OTOH, has become a witch hunt captained by any cavalier politician seeking power at any means. It's amusing that the Harper Government, presently in power, openly, passionately uses "attack ads" while posing as politically correct. It's all very relative.
The problem Conservatives in Canada and Republicans in America face is that both parties have taken a Sophist, relativist approach to gaining and holding power. In a Godless world both parties have embraced the religious right and pretty much any other splinter group in an attempt to cobble together enough votes to gain power. Rove in America, like Harper in Canada embody the philosophical, relativist road to power by any means. Hate speech legislation is just another iteration of the political rights perennial attempt to position themselves as the voice of what is right, proper and politically correct at the expense of freedom of speech.
In an ever shrinking, heavily populated world of limited resources Hate Speech legislation is a card that will probably be repeatedly played as countries come to terms with a Brave New World. As a species we're creatures of context and thus there's ample evidence to suggest something akin to Hate Speech legislation can be effective, even if people like myself view it as voodooism.
Other than straight up, behavioural, response mechanisms there's more room to maneuver when manipulating a game player. The OCW intro psych course will introduce you to love on a suspension bridge. There's a study that was conducted on a suspension bridge over a deep gorge. The object of the study is to demonstrate the correlation between circumstance and the way the brain overlays states to arrive at different conclusions given different inputs. In the suspension bridge study the fear engendered by being on a high suspension bridge is used to reinforce attraction to a potential sexual partner. The faster heart beat fear engenders on a suspension bridge will reinforce the degree of attractiveness we find in another person because the faster heart rate is no different than the increased heart rate engendered by an encounter with someone we find very attractive. The same person encountered on a suspension bridge is found to be more attractive than the same persons encountered in more mundane surroundings.
No dickwad, I'm not translating my insults from another language, just another field, biology. And no, dickwad, I don't take things hard, mostly I let them slide but instead of your parent post making a point you followed it up with a gratuitous insult, so, I gave you a couple in return. I don't like the sort of tribal shit you spewed out. As for/. I've an account from the late 90's I can't be bothered to reactivate because it's more fun to see how little tribal boys and girls like yourself have changed the site. As to my karma, I'm back at/. after a 3 year hiatus and am just hanging around to play while I get other things done.
having trouble with penis fencing and flatworm men? Try the videos "The Shape Of Life"
Lastly, you didn't make any points, you, like me, just made an unsupported comment and the little troll, tribal, dog moderators did what they've always done. As I used to strongly advocate: Keel haul the/. weenies.
No dickwad that wasn't impotent rage, that was me just playing with words which is what I do. OTOH I don't like playing with dickwads. By your reasoning HIV jumped to humans from chimpanzees because chimpanzees were enjoying a population boom. You're comment still remains unsubstatiated. I'm not much given to penis fencing with flatworm men so I'll just leave you to amuse yourself.
Yes viruses can be said to mutate all the time but the rest of your post is unsubstantiated and no more substantial than mine. This isn't a refereed site. It's an open forum that invites free style commentary. If you weren't so retentively anal and proudly displaying your anus like a bizarre, tribal necklace displaying a displaced genital fixation you might have picked up on that by now. dickwad.
As we extinguish species by the ark load it's worth musing where all their on board viruses and bacterium will land when they jump ship onto a new species. Reminds me of the ship of sick sailors who landed in Italy with the first boat load of rats bearing the plague. Supposedly many of the viruses that now plague us have adapted to us by way of our domestic livestock, especially fowl. We may be setting the table for the little critters with our obsessive need for antibiotics and wiping all indoor surfaces down with lethal cleaners. The Swiss did some research and found that farm kids raised tending livestock had stronger immune systems than Swiss city kids raised in sanitized urban housing.
How far off are we being able to speak of income in terms of Joules? Further off beat than my comment? Perhaps, but quips about the 'Electric Universe' aside, Joules may be a feasible accounting convention. Everything can be viewed as value added and, therefore, unfortunately, taxed. We use money to measure value in trade, but, money is subject to any number of quick and dirty fixes. Joules OTOH may be the best way to measure wealth. The Japanese are very typical of other historical island peoples with limited amounts of arable land and the drive and ability to innovate. My guess is they make such a venture pay off in the long run. Yes, Keynes quipped, in the long run we're all dead.
Twitter's probably a great way to hit on girls. Has anyone written a guide to social hacks for twitter? Formated into twitter the world's greatest collection of one liners guaranteed to get girls to talk to you? Grandpa had a bunch of books on how to win friends and influence people, maybe it's time to revive those, rebrand everything and feed it to the noobs?...profit!
Twitter's a girl thing. Guys won't put up with it anymore than they'd ask for directions. And we've got to have a knack or secret decoder ring, some blatant twitter thing ain't gonna cut it. "Your skillet can tweet when your eggs are burnt. And they say innovation is dead." Innovation is refusing to time boiling eggs with a clock but using the toaster settting to pop toast at just the right darkness that after the toast is butter and set out it's time to take the eggs out. It's deep dark secret guy stuff. Like cave paintings. Twitter is for chicks.
Your local library probably has the Scientific American publication, "Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games: The Entire Collection of His Scientific American Columns". The version I borrowed runs pdf files with adobe reader 6 on the disk.
Totally agree. I still run 2 single core Athlon 64s S939 as servers. I'm typing this on my old intel D865 2.8 gaming box running Ubuntu. My dual core Athlon 3800 is my production box and runs Handbrake all day every day while I hack around with code 'n stuff. The Quad runs Vista (ya I know) as a gaming and Home Theater box in the living room. From the old P4 on up, my biggest problem is not being able to justify junking boxes that are still very usable, but they're multiplying like pet rabbits and I've got to find good homes for them all.:)
>"and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."
Now see, it's that bit, the bit about it being fully controllable that makes me nervous. Why did they feel the need to put that bit in. Slimy mold; intelligent, massively parallel processing robot... fully controllable, yes but by whom and for how long.
Off the cuff, because I'm too lazy to track down any citations, there's some evidence and theory gaining traction that we speak with an accent as well as think with an accent. The window for learning one's mother tongue may be coeval with the window for acquiring our social values and thus our prejudices. Young brains seem to abstract a subset of rules for speech, and, possibly for social values and manners of thought, from a universal set of rules, or, perhaps from a universal potential limited only by physical constraints. Much as most parents miss a golden opportunity to let their children easily acquire foreign languages during their most plastic years they may also miss the opportunity to let their children gain a broad range of ways to investigate the world. There's a innate urge to protect one's children from harmful outside influences, but it's also necessary to allow them to acquire a broad potential before the window for acquiring life long habits closes. There's no reason most children can't acquire at least 3 or 4 languages instinctively, as language is an instinct. Literacy is a very different thing and, even today, the world illiteracy rate is disgusting. It's worth remembering that a child's destruction and discarding of a new toy may mask a learning process that works at a rate most adults can only keep pace with (if at all) by having acquire "tricks of the trade".
just my loose change
I wait until the latest and greatest has gained the larger part of retail shelf space then buy the most established and robustly tested stuff at the price nearest it's exit price just before retailers stop carrying it. The problem with the latest and greatest stuff is that often there's bells and whistles that won't make it because the market goes in another direction.
I just built an intel Quad core for under $400, but used some components from cannibalized systems. Right now USB, SATA, and the PCI bus all have new standards on the way and I can't see building a new box on the latest and greatest until those three items have been well tested. I'm not sure too many informed buyers will look at new stuff until, figuratively speaking, the equivalent of SP1 comes out.
Osprey, not peregrines, peregrines take pigeons a lot. In Calgary, Alta. they used to nest in niches on the outsides of high office buildings, and, likely fed nearly exclusively on pigeons. The Wikipedia article will introduce you to Osprey. I canoed into an isolated mountain lake and watched a nested pair ply their trade for nearly a week. They only ever took fish. On the west coast I've camped for weeks near nested pairs and they only ever, that I saw, took fish. Peregrines, likely, are one of the prey birds that are thought to be have multiple fovea. Having more than one fovea they're able to focus differently with different fovea as they attack at high speeds and thus not crash. Although I've not yet read anything detailed, the necessary brain wiring is probably very, very interesting. I'd pay big coin to be multi foveated. I think the inner experience would be awesome.
Threshold is a good working concept when addressing how to model a complex thing. In science threshold can be ostensibly seen in terms of the first microscope and the first telescope. From there spectroscopy presents another method with certain thresholds. Studying sound to model the inner sun is a recent example to getting around limitations to extend our present thresholds enabling and constraining our ability to model the Universe. The fact that we've hypotheses like String Theory suggests there are thresholds we've not yet crossed that would enable us to answer certain questions. The question arises as to why most people seem desperately to need a concept like truth rather than living in an interesting and engaging state of doubt.
Models of the world or the Universe should express elegance, or, simplicity, like Einstein said, a theory should be as simple as possible but not too simple, but for a theory to be elegant it should, IMHO, be rigorous, where rigorous is taken to mean all or 'enough' particulars have been inspected to warrant an elegant theory. This idea seems to me to go back to threshold.
Ideas about free will are speculative. I don't know that free will is viable except as a fiction because I'm not sure it's right to say an individual exists in any meaningful way. Language is heavily vested in purposiveness and unsuited to some subject matter. Whenever I think about free will I recall my idea for a slasher flic starring Ludwig Wittgenstein wielding Occam's Razor (it's still in development, but I like it).
Uhmmm, no, don't know what that is but I'll check it out. My posts are mostly just me fidgeting. After a ~3 year hiatus I'm back on/. because I've 3 large (for me) projects on the go and whenever that happens I start to fidget. Sorry, but it's probably gonna go one for the next 18 months or so, then, I'll disappear again. Best just to ignore me.
I worked for a couple of months on a farm run on manual labour. Dray horses were used when more than a strong back was needed. The owner of the farm made what he called his Kickapoo Juice from the watermelons he grew in a dirt patch near his house. It was a low alcohol content, mild sweet, hot summer's day drink. I high recommend watermelon as a base for biofuel.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Aren't arguments about Linux being broken on the desktop red herrings? (linux, tux, herrings, red herrings?... ba boom tsh, I'll be here all week) The argument should be whether Linux, in my case Ubuntu, allows a Luser to work on h/is/er desktop. Positing one hypothetical, or specific case, after another and then proclaiming Linux is broken on the desktop is silly, as you pointed out. Linux now, compared to the early edition of Mandrake I first installed, is a working desktop OS.
Any OS intended for the desktop is trying to perform as a calibrated solution to an arbitrarily established target while trying to incorporate new features reflecting the advances of hardware manufactures. Moore's Law can be made to suggest the moving target any desktop OS has to aim at while not wasting limited resources developing features that the market might relegate to the margins. Linux has done, and continues to do, a great job of staying on target but will never meet the demands of all users, including those who want a, more or less, marginal feature made mainstream. Stating the bleeding obvious the strength of Linux and Open Source is anyone who wants a feature develop that feature given it's feasibility and a willingness to spend the necessary resources.
All large corporations, especially widely held corporations, are bound and driven by the profit motive. Limited resources and profit expectations don't always allow the best of all possible worlds.
May you never know more of life than you now know.
'Bicycling Science', Ergonomics and Mechanics, by Whit and Wilson, mit press, is now in it's 3rd (?) edition. It's a must read, should have, if you're at all serious about cycling and it bleeds geekiness. I build my own bikes from stripped down frames up and do almost all my own maintenance. I've played with ideas for new bike designs for a few years and now am onto a new brain storm, likely to end with me struck by lightening and toasted, but I can't get enough of it.
Both genders are equally susceptible to the effects of hormones overriding their more rational thought processes. Our limbic system, (limbic I've recently been told is now a deprecated term to describe to describe our motivational systems) flush our more rational processes. What has become more apparent is that our wet core is necessary to our rational decision making no matter how we might like it to be otherwise. Women are just as hormonally driven as men and the study, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuates gender stereotyping and myth making that suggests the horned, male ego is pushing the agenda. It's a mark of cultivation and high intelligence that our libido can't cloud our objectivity. The female psyche may not be the eternal mystery to men that our mythology suggests although there are deep distinctive traits. I've been married and, if you count co-habitations as periods of 6 months or longer, then I've lived with 7 women. Although women, as a (stereo) type, might not count 6 months as a long term cohabitation and might just see it as typical of the male willingness to say anything and do anything just to get laid 2 or 3 times a day. In my experience, if emotions engendered by attractive, potential sex partners can inhibit our higher reasoning faculty, then emotions and drugs are devastating. Personally I've found the drunker I get the more attractive women find me. This effect is more pronounced if I'm alone on a bar stool and two or more attractive women are near by. Inevitably, as I nurse one drink after another, and glance their way, sooner or later, one or more return my interested looks and an uncontrolled giggle will escape. That's when I know they're attracted to me. Of course that kind of attention from beautiful women is unsettling and I usually down a few more quick drinks just to put things in perspective. It's then they can't seem to stop staring at me, and, just about then, the giggling stops and things get serious. I'm pretty sure their upset looks reflect a conflict among them as to which one will leave with me. Although I've never been able to verify my guess because about then one or all of them will ask the bartender to see me out. I take this as a consensus on their part that if one of them can't have me then, in the name of friendship, they'll jointly and severally forego my company. I usually leave peacefully not wanting to destroy any close friendships.
>or to cause to be so communicated
>to hatred or contempt" based on characteristics such as race, religion, sexual orientation, and so on
The issues are very complex. My family goes well back into Canada's roots on both sides and, as a family we reside pretty much country wide.
Canada's heart lies in the idea of a cultural mosaic, maybe that came from our bilingual heritage and the more orderly development of our frontiers. Maybe it came from it being just to fucking cold to bother to with hate, and, hockey got rid of the aggressive edge. I think it was J. Cartier who said, "This must be the land God gave to Cain." What is certain is that Canada as a country bound to the idea of a cultural mosaic has always been deeply attentive to the rights of minorities and not without reason. Mackenzie King, one of Canada's longest reigning PMs, who held seances with the spirits of his dead mother and his dead dog fought against immigration into Canada by the mountainous Shik people of northern India because our climate would be too inhospitably cold for them (not as cold as the Prime Minister's shoulder).
I think what's new to the mix is a shift in demographics, a shift in political tactics and maybe the first hint of a Brave New World. The European stock that initially invaded North America has been recently outnumbered and, last year, Asian immigrants were the most prevalent. The shift in demographic to a truly multi racial, multi cultural mix probably has heightened the likelihood and exposure of racial hate. The law was to some extent enacted to combat racism doing more than rearing it's hydra heads. Political Correctness, OTOH, has become a witch hunt captained by any cavalier politician seeking power at any means. It's amusing that the Harper Government, presently in power, openly, passionately uses "attack ads" while posing as politically correct. It's all very relative.
The problem Conservatives in Canada and Republicans in America face is that both parties have taken a Sophist, relativist approach to gaining and holding power. In a Godless world both parties have embraced the religious right and pretty much any other splinter group in an attempt to cobble together enough votes to gain power. Rove in America, like Harper in Canada embody the philosophical, relativist road to power by any means. Hate speech legislation is just another iteration of the political rights perennial attempt to position themselves as the voice of what is right, proper and politically correct at the expense of freedom of speech.
In an ever shrinking, heavily populated world of limited resources Hate Speech legislation is a card that will probably be repeatedly played as countries come to terms with a Brave New World. As a species we're creatures of context and thus there's ample evidence to suggest something akin to Hate Speech legislation can be effective, even if people like myself view it as voodooism.
Other than straight up, behavioural, response mechanisms there's more room to maneuver when manipulating a game player. The OCW intro psych course will introduce you to love on a suspension bridge. There's a study that was conducted on a suspension bridge over a deep gorge. The object of the study is to demonstrate the correlation between circumstance and the way the brain overlays states to arrive at different conclusions given different inputs. In the suspension bridge study the fear engendered by being on a high suspension bridge is used to reinforce attraction to a potential sexual partner. The faster heart beat fear engenders on a suspension bridge will reinforce the degree of attractiveness we find in another person because the faster heart rate is no different than the increased heart rate engendered by an encounter with someone we find very attractive. The same person encountered on a suspension bridge is found to be more attractive than the same persons encountered in more mundane surroundings.
having trouble with penis fencing and flatworm men? Try the videos "The Shape Of Life"
Lastly, you didn't make any points, you, like me, just made an unsupported comment and the little troll, tribal, dog moderators did what they've always done. As I used to strongly advocate: Keel haul the /. weenies.
No dickwad that wasn't impotent rage, that was me just playing with words which is what I do. OTOH I don't like playing with dickwads. By your reasoning HIV jumped to humans from chimpanzees because chimpanzees were enjoying a population boom. You're comment still remains unsubstatiated. I'm not much given to penis fencing with flatworm men so I'll just leave you to amuse yourself.
Yes viruses can be said to mutate all the time but the rest of your post is unsubstantiated and no more substantial than mine. This isn't a refereed site. It's an open forum that invites free style commentary. If you weren't so retentively anal and proudly displaying your anus like a bizarre, tribal necklace displaying a displaced genital fixation you might have picked up on that by now. dickwad.
As we extinguish species by the ark load it's worth musing where all their on board viruses and bacterium will land when they jump ship onto a new species. Reminds me of the ship of sick sailors who landed in Italy with the first boat load of rats bearing the plague. Supposedly many of the viruses that now plague us have adapted to us by way of our domestic livestock, especially fowl. We may be setting the table for the little critters with our obsessive need for antibiotics and wiping all indoor surfaces down with lethal cleaners. The Swiss did some research and found that farm kids raised tending livestock had stronger immune systems than Swiss city kids raised in sanitized urban housing.
How far off are we being able to speak of income in terms of Joules? Further off beat than my comment? Perhaps, but quips about the 'Electric Universe' aside, Joules may be a feasible accounting convention. Everything can be viewed as value added and, therefore, unfortunately, taxed. We use money to measure value in trade, but, money is subject to any number of quick and dirty fixes. Joules OTOH may be the best way to measure wealth. The Japanese are very typical of other historical island peoples with limited amounts of arable land and the drive and ability to innovate. My guess is they make such a venture pay off in the long run. Yes, Keynes quipped, in the long run we're all dead.
Twitter's probably a great way to hit on girls. Has anyone written a guide to social hacks for twitter? Formated into twitter the world's greatest collection of one liners guaranteed to get girls to talk to you? Grandpa had a bunch of books on how to win friends and influence people, maybe it's time to revive those, rebrand everything and feed it to the noobs? ...profit!
Twitter's a girl thing. Guys won't put up with it anymore than they'd ask for directions. And we've got to have a knack or secret decoder ring, some blatant twitter thing ain't gonna cut it. "Your skillet can tweet when your eggs are burnt. And they say innovation is dead." Innovation is refusing to time boiling eggs with a clock but using the toaster settting to pop toast at just the right darkness that after the toast is butter and set out it's time to take the eggs out. It's deep dark secret guy stuff. Like cave paintings. Twitter is for chicks.
Your local library probably has the Scientific American publication, "Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games: The Entire Collection of His Scientific American Columns". The version I borrowed runs pdf files with adobe reader 6 on the disk.
Totally agree. I still run 2 single core Athlon 64s S939 as servers. I'm typing this on my old intel D865 2.8 gaming box running Ubuntu. My dual core Athlon 3800 is my production box and runs Handbrake all day every day while I hack around with code 'n stuff. The Quad runs Vista (ya I know) as a gaming and Home Theater box in the living room. From the old P4 on up, my biggest problem is not being able to justify junking boxes that are still very usable, but they're multiplying like pet rabbits and I've got to find good homes for them all. :)
>"and programmable amorphous intelligent robot with an embedded massively parallel computer."
Now see, it's that bit, the bit about it being fully controllable that makes me nervous. Why did they feel the need to put that bit in. Slimy mold; intelligent, massively parallel processing robot... fully controllable, yes but by whom and for how long.
Off the cuff, because I'm too lazy to track down any citations, there's some evidence and theory gaining traction that we speak with an accent as well as think with an accent. The window for learning one's mother tongue may be coeval with the window for acquiring our social values and thus our prejudices. Young brains seem to abstract a subset of rules for speech, and, possibly for social values and manners of thought, from a universal set of rules, or, perhaps from a universal potential limited only by physical constraints. Much as most parents miss a golden opportunity to let their children easily acquire foreign languages during their most plastic years they may also miss the opportunity to let their children gain a broad range of ways to investigate the world. There's a innate urge to protect one's children from harmful outside influences, but it's also necessary to allow them to acquire a broad potential before the window for acquiring life long habits closes. There's no reason most children can't acquire at least 3 or 4 languages instinctively, as language is an instinct. Literacy is a very different thing and, even today, the world illiteracy rate is disgusting. It's worth remembering that a child's destruction and discarding of a new toy may mask a learning process that works at a rate most adults can only keep pace with (if at all) by having acquire "tricks of the trade". just my loose change
I wait until the latest and greatest has gained the larger part of retail shelf space then buy the most established and robustly tested stuff at the price nearest it's exit price just before retailers stop carrying it. The problem with the latest and greatest stuff is that often there's bells and whistles that won't make it because the market goes in another direction.
I just built an intel Quad core for under $400, but used some components from cannibalized systems. Right now USB, SATA, and the PCI bus all have new standards on the way and I can't see building a new box on the latest and greatest until those three items have been well tested. I'm not sure too many informed buyers will look at new stuff until, figuratively speaking, the equivalent of SP1 comes out.
Osprey, not peregrines, peregrines take pigeons a lot. In Calgary, Alta. they used to nest in niches on the outsides of high office buildings, and, likely fed nearly exclusively on pigeons. The Wikipedia article will introduce you to Osprey. I canoed into an isolated mountain lake and watched a nested pair ply their trade for nearly a week. They only ever took fish. On the west coast I've camped for weeks near nested pairs and they only ever, that I saw, took fish. Peregrines, likely, are one of the prey birds that are thought to be have multiple fovea. Having more than one fovea they're able to focus differently with different fovea as they attack at high speeds and thus not crash. Although I've not yet read anything detailed, the necessary brain wiring is probably very, very interesting. I'd pay big coin to be multi foveated. I think the inner experience would be awesome.
Ospreys are deeply beautiful birds of prey and watching them is magic, but I've never seen an osprey take anything but fish.
Well, if I could be even reasonably certain I could kill 'em all, then, really there's no limit I wouldn't go beyond.
Threshold is a good working concept when addressing how to model a complex thing. In science threshold can be ostensibly seen in terms of the first microscope and the first telescope. From there spectroscopy presents another method with certain thresholds. Studying sound to model the inner sun is a recent example to getting around limitations to extend our present thresholds enabling and constraining our ability to model the Universe. The fact that we've hypotheses like String Theory suggests there are thresholds we've not yet crossed that would enable us to answer certain questions. The question arises as to why most people seem desperately to need a concept like truth rather than living in an interesting and engaging state of doubt.
Models of the world or the Universe should express elegance, or, simplicity, like Einstein said, a theory should be as simple as possible but not too simple, but for a theory to be elegant it should, IMHO, be rigorous, where rigorous is taken to mean all or 'enough' particulars have been inspected to warrant an elegant theory. This idea seems to me to go back to threshold.
Ideas about free will are speculative. I don't know that free will is viable except as a fiction because I'm not sure it's right to say an individual exists in any meaningful way. Language is heavily vested in purposiveness and unsuited to some subject matter. Whenever I think about free will I recall my idea for a slasher flic starring Ludwig Wittgenstein wielding Occam's Razor (it's still in development, but I like it).
... for those you want dead.
Uhmmm, no, don't know what that is but I'll check it out. My posts are mostly just me fidgeting. After a ~3 year hiatus I'm back on /. because I've 3 large (for me) projects on the go and whenever that happens I start to fidget. Sorry, but it's probably gonna go one for the next 18 months or so, then, I'll disappear again. Best just to ignore me.
I worked for a couple of months on a farm run on manual labour. Dray horses were used when more than a strong back was needed. The owner of the farm made what he called his Kickapoo Juice from the watermelons he grew in a dirt patch near his house. It was a low alcohol content, mild sweet, hot summer's day drink. I high recommend watermelon as a base for biofuel. :)